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Museums

The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence

These newly refurbished rooms pose several questions about the nature of great art and what the difference is between a copy, reproduction, fake and facsimile

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale.

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